A
century on from the British suffrage campaign, feminists are still told
that being pleasing is the best strategy for their success – and it’s
still not true

Michelle SmithMonday 28 December 2015The new film Suffragette,
released in Australia on Boxing Day, begins with female activists
smashing London shop windows and bombing the partially completed home of
the chancellor of the exchequer. It dramatises the militant actions of
feminists from 1905 until the outbreak of the first world war, as they
sought the right for British women to vote.

Edwardian women appear
genteel in photographs, but the tactics of the suffragettes
transgressed feminine expectations of the era. Suffragettes disrupted
debate in parliament and struggled with police in violent marches. One
famously slashed a painting of a naked woman in the National Gallery and
another even came at Winston Churchill on a train platform with a
riding whip.

With England more than a decade behind New Zealand,
which had granted women’s suffrage in 1893, it was clear that polite
and reasoned requests for women’s political rights had not worked.
Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the suffrage movement, explained that
unruly activism was essential:

If
the general public were pleased with what we are doing, that would be a
proof that our warfare is ineffective. We don’t intend that you should
be pleased.

Despite the sustained campaign,
full suffrage for women was not achieved until 1928. More than a century
on from the British suffrage campaign, the message that being pleasing
is not the optimal route to political and social change remains just as
pertinent.

Increasingly men are informing feminists that they would be more successful if they made their politics more palatable. The UN’s HeforShe
campaign, launched by the unthreatening Emma Watson, is often heralded
as a positive way to involve men in work toward gender equality.

Both
the idea that feminism needs to be appealing to men and that men should
be central to its progress are anti-feminist ideas in themselves.

Regardless
of their approach, feminists have always been characterised
unfavourably for their social goals, looks, and refusal to defer to men.

Mocking
cartoons of suffragettes showed them beating men to the ground with
umbrellas or standing over their husbands and forcing them to clean the
house. These caricatures took issue with the way that women’s demands
for the vote seemed to be upending the natural order in which men were
physically dominant and women were best suited to domestic work. Others
lampooned the unattractiveness of suffragettes: they were drawn as old,
dowdy and either lacking in teeth or suffering from pronounced
overbites.

WASHINGTON — The hedge fund magnates Daniel S. Loeb, Louis Moore Bacon and Steven A. Cohen
have much in common. They have managed billions of dollars in capital,
earning vast fortunes. They have invested large sums in art — and
millions more in political candidates.

Moreover,
each has exploited an esoteric tax loophole that saved them millions in
taxes. The trick? Route the money to Bermuda and back.

With
inequality at its highest levels in nearly a century and public debate
rising over whether the government should respond to it through higher
taxes on the wealthy, the very richest Americans have financed a
sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their
fortunes. Some call it the “income defense industry,” consisting of a
high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax
activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers,
virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means.

In
recent years, this apparatus has become one of the most powerful
avenues of influence for wealthy Americans of all political stripes,
including Mr. Loeb and Mr. Cohen, who give heavily to Republicans, and
the liberal billionaire George Soros, who has called for higher levies on the rich while at the same time using tax loopholes to bolster his own fortune.

All are among a small group providing much of the early cash for the 2016 presidential campaign.

Operating largely out of public view — in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service
— the wealthy have used their influence to steadily whittle away at the
government’s ability to tax them. The effect has been to create a kind
of private tax system, catering to only several thousand Americans.

The
impact on their own fortunes has been stark. Two decades ago, when Bill
Clinton was elected president, the 400 highest-earning taxpayers in
America paid nearly 27 percent of their income in federal taxes,
according to I.R.S. data.
By 2012, when President Obama was re-elected, that figure had fallen to
less than 17 percent, which is just slightly more than the typical
family making $100,000 annually, when payroll taxes are included for
both groups.

The
ultra-wealthy “literally pay millions of dollars for these services,”
said Jeffrey A. Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern
University who studies economic elites, “and save in the tens or
hundreds of millions in taxes.”

Some
of the biggest current tax battles are being waged by some of the most
generous supporters of 2016 candidates. They include the families of the
hedge fund investors Robert Mercer, who gives to Republicans, and James Simons, who gives to Democrats; as well as the options trader Jeffrey Yass, a libertarian-leaning donor to Republicans.

That might sound foreboding if not hyperbolic, but it's a serious and widespread problem
in the United States, where poor kids enter school already a year
behind the kids of wealthier parents. That deficit is among the largest
in the developed world, and it can be extraordinarily difficult to
narrow later in life.

This is one of the key takeaways from a new book about how United States is failing its children. The book, called Too Many Children Left Behind,
is written by Columbia University professor Jane Waldfogel, a long-time
researcher of poverty and inequality. And it will force almost anyone
to reflect on the impact of unchecked inequality on children.

Waldfogel
says the massive achievement gap in the United States is a blemish for a
country that aspires to be the greatest in the world. In her book, she
shows that achievement gap is pronounced to a startling degree in the
first years of life.

I spoke with Waldfogel to learn more
about how the early years of a child's life can impact the rest of it,
what role school plays in perpetuating inequality, and why the United
States isn't doing a great job of creating an equal playing field for
its children. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Robert ReichMonday, December 14, 2015The great American middle class has become an anxious class – and it’s in revolt. Before I explain how that revolt is playing out, you need to understand the sources of the anxiety.Start with the fact that the middle class is shrinking, according to a new Pew survey.

The odds of falling into poverty are frighteningly high, especially for the majority without college degrees. Two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Most could lose their jobs at any time.Many are part of a burgeoning “on-demand” workforce – employed as needed, paid whatever they can get whenever they can get it.

Yet if they don’t keep up with rent or mortgage payments, or can’t pay for groceries or utilities, they’ll lose their footing.

The stress is taking a toll. For the first time in history, the lifespans of middle-class whites are dropping.

According to research
by the recent Nobel-prize winning economist, Angus Deaton, and his
co-researcher Anne Case, middle-aged white men and women in the United
States have been dying earlier.

They’re poisoning themselves with drugs and alcohol, or committing suicide.

The
odds of being gunned down in America by a jihadist are far smaller than
the odds of such self-inflicted deaths, but the recent tragedy in San
Bernadino only heightens an overwhelming sense of arbitrariness and
fragility.

The anxious class feels vulnerable to forces over which they have no control. Terrible things happen for no reason.

The lives of children from rich and poor American families look more different than ever before.

Well-off
families are ruled by calendars, with children enrolled in ballet,
soccer and after-school programs, according to a new Pew Research Center
survey. There are usually two parents, who spend a lot of time reading
to children and worrying about their anxiety levels and hectic
schedules.

In poor families, however, children tend to spend their
time at home or with extended family, the survey found. They are more
likely to grow up in neighborhoods that their parents say aren’t great
for raising children, and their parents worry about them getting shot,
beaten up or in trouble with the law.

The class differences in
child rearing are growing, researchers say — a symptom of widening
inequality with far-reaching consequences. Different upbringings set
children on different paths and can deepen socioeconomic divisions,
especially because education is strongly linked to earnings.

Children
grow up learning the skills to succeed in their socioeconomic stratum,
but not necessarily others.

“Early
childhood experiences can be very consequential for children’s
long-term social, emotional and cognitive development,” said Sean F. Reardon,
professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford
University. “And because those influence educational success and later
earnings, early childhood experiences cast a lifelong shadow.”

The
cycle continues: Poorer parents have less time and fewer resources to
invest in their children, which can leave children less prepared for
school and work, which leads to lower earnings.

American
parents want similar things for their children, the Pew report and past
research have found: for them to be healthy and happy, honest and
ethical, caring and compassionate. There is no best parenting style or
philosophy, researchers say, and across income groups, 92 percent of
parents say they are doing a good job at raising their children.

Yet they are doing it quite differently.

Middle-class and higher-income parents see their children as projects in need of careful cultivation, says Annette Lareau,
whose groundbreaking research on the topic was published in her book
“Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life.” They try to develop
their skills through close supervision and organized activities, and
teach children to question authority figures and navigate elite
institutions.

Working-class
parents, meanwhile, believe their children will naturally thrive, and
give them far greater independence and time for free play. They are
taught to be compliant and deferential to adults.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Being a woman isn't about embracing a social role or gender, gender,
gender. It is about being an adult female bodied person or being
assumed to be an adult female bodied person.

Glamour
is the stuff of the elite and overly privileged. Hunger Games
allegorically shows how the elites of the world treat the masses. The
working people do the menial work and fight the wars, the privileged
bask in their glamour. You don't have to be a Marxist or Tea Party prole
to see that one.

Despite
its female hero, The Hunger Games constantly depicts the conventional
trappings of femininity as decadent, weak and dangerous.

Noah BerlatskyNovember 30, 2015
In The Hunger Games,
the Capitol is the luxurious seat of evil. While the drab working class
in the districts toil in poverty and filth and boring clothes, Capitol
citizens stroll about in pampered splendour. President Snow raises white
perfumed roses. His populace is decked out in gaudily colored costumes,
preposterous coiffures and elaborately styled facial hair. The
upper-class, in short, is decadent – and decadence, in both Suzanne Collins’ books and the films, means flamboyant femininity.

Disgust
with, and hatred of femininity is often linked to hatred of women – as
in the uber-masculine James Bond novels, with their casual disdain for
the disposable sex objects who cross the hero’s path.The Hunger Games
doesn’t hate women, though. Its hero is a woman. But, as a woman, she
is a hero precisely because she rejects the traditional roles of
femininity. At home in District 12, Katniss wears utilitarian, drab
clothing. After her father dies, she steps into his role as provider and
hunter, leaving the confines of the domestic village for adventures in
the woods. When her sister is threatened, Katniss does the stereotypical
manly, heroic thing. You could certainly say her feelings for her
sister are maternal, but she expresses them most dramatically through
being iconically paternal – by going into battle to protect her family.

The
Hunger Games does put Katniss in female roles with some regularity –
but it invariably does so to emphasize those roles’ artificiality, and
her distance and discomfort with them. She wears a series of striking,
literally incendiary dresses, which in the films emphasise Jennifer
Lawrence’s considerable glamour. But, while Katniss admires these
dresses (and shares a bond of deep affection with designer Cinna), she’s
wearing them because she has to, not because she wants to. She has to
dress up first in order to win sponsors to help her during the Hunger Games
battle, and then to inspire the resistance against the capital. The
dresses are a performance. They function as a kind of drag, not an
expression of her own gender identity or choices.

Similarly,
Katniss’s romance plot is presented as a front. She and Peeta pretend to
be in love for the cameras to, again, woo sponsors and to assure
President Snow that their main interest is true love, not rebellion. The
wedding preparations are an elaborate ruse, which underlines Katniss’s
distance from the traditional feminine romance narrative. She doesn’t
want marriage and happily ever after; she is not that feminine
archetype. If she could, she would head for the woods.

QADIYA,
Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic
State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was
not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than
Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned
and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

“I
kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is
so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me
that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said
that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an
interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she
escaped after 11 months of captivity.

The
systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority
has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology
of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was
reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls
who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the
group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been
enshrined in the group’s core tenets.

The
trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent
infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held,
viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated
fleet of buses used to transport them.

A
total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are
still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the
Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery,
including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And
the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from
deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and
dating is forbidden.

A
growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has
established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual
issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last
month. Repeatedly, the ISIS
leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran
and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to
elevate and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial,
even virtuous.

Last
week, the National Women's Studies Association membership voted to
boycott Israel. The resolution reads, in part: "As feminist scholars,
activists, teachers, and public intellectuals . . . we cannot overlook
injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence,
perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights, as well as the
colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during
the 1948 Nakba."

This vote is an utter betrayal of both reality and of women — especially women who live under Sharia law.

In
1970, I taught one of the first Women's Studies courses in the country.
What I had envisioned for the discipline has nothing to do with today's
anti-American, anti-Israel, post-colonial, faux-scholarly feminist
academy.

Marxism triumphed among radical feminists—and then they
became "Palestinianized." Women's Studies professors are less concerned
with the "occupation" of women's bodies world-wide than they are with
the alleged occupation of a country that has never existed: "Palestine."

So
I wasn't surprised that the association held a plenary panel last year
on that crucial feminist issue: "The Imperial Politics of Nation-States:
US, Israel, and Palestine." Panelists included former communist Angela
Davis, the recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize; Rebecca Vilkomerson, the
executive director of the infamous anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace;
and Dr. Islah Jad of Birzeit University, whose focus seems to be Palestinian women only.

They vowed to get the association to boycott Israel. Now they've succeeded.

But
these "Feminists for Palestine" are in denial about Islam's long and
ugly history of imperialism, colonialism, gender and religious
apartheid, anti-black racism, conversion via the sword, executions of
apostates and slavery.

The association doesn't condemn, for
example, the atrocities being practiced by Hamas, ISIS, Boko Haram and
the Taliban against Muslim women, children and dissidents and against
Christian, Yazidi and Kurdish women whom ISIS has captured as sex
slaves.

Monday, December 7, 2015

A major study that undermines the damaging idea that male and female brains are fundamentally different could be a game-changer

Gina Rippon30 November 2015One
of the biggest barriers to equality is crumbling, thanks to a study
that blows away the misconception that male and female brains are
distinct.

Based on detailed and careful analysis of core features
seen in scans of more than 1400 female and male human brains, Israeli
researcher Daphna Joel and colleagues demonstrated that most are unique
mixes or “mosaics” of features previously thought to be either “male” or
“female”. A brain that is not a mix was found to be extremely rare.

The
result is a major challenge to the entrenched misconceptions typified
by the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” hokum. My hope is it
will be a game-changer for the 21st century.

Crucially, it means
the power of neuroimaging to explore and explain the links between brain
and behaviour can at last come into its own, freed from the constraints
of preconceived stereotypes. Our understanding of sex-related brain
differences will move beyond simple and outdated dichotomous thinking.

Knowing
the controversy associated with such declarations, the authors have
been very careful to use a range of different datasets from different
laboratories and to investigate the veracity of their findings using
more than a single neuroimaging measure.

Their paper adds to
similar discussions in neuroscience, as well as to the canon of recent
research findings that previously “well-established” sex differences in
brain structures turn out to be false when careful analytical techniques
are applied.

And it gels with the broader idea that the biology
of sex differences is not what we thought. A news feature in Nature last
year proclaimed: “Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is simplistic”,
reporting data showing that, even in the most fundamental aspects of
sexual differentiation, including chromosomes, cells and genital
anatomy, thinking in simple male/female terms is no longer tenable.What’s
more, for several years, psychologists have been saying that, in terms
of cognitive skills and personality characteristics, the “two” sexes are
much more similar than different. Just knowing whether someone is male
or female is a very poor predictor of almost any kind of behaviour.

Thursday, December 3, 2015

It was ostensibly a book tour but I wanted to talk with conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers.

I
intended to put into practice what I tell my students – that the best
way to learn is to talk with people who disagree you. I wanted to learn
from red America, and hoped they’d also learn a bit from me (and perhaps
also buy my book).

But something odd happened. It turned out that
many of the conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers I met agreed with
much of what I had to say, and I agreed with them.

For example,
most condemned what they called “crony capitalism,” by which they mean
big corporations getting sweetheart deals from the government because of
lobbying and campaign contributions.

I met with group of small
farmers in Missouri who were livid about growth of “factory farms” owned
and run by big corporations, that abused land and cattle, damaged the
environment, and ultimately harmed consumers.

They claimed giant
food processors were using their monopoly power to squeeze the farmers
dry, and the government was doing squat about it because of Big
Agriculture’s money.

I met in Cincinnati with Republican
small-business owners who are still hurting from the bursting of the
housing bubble and the bailout of Wall Street.

Do you have a male brain or a female brain? The answer, according to science, is no.

If
you didn’t expect this to be a yes-or-no question, you’re not alone.
Male brains do seem to be built differently than female brains.
An analysis of more than 100 studies found that the volume of a man’s
brain is 8% to 13% greater than the volume of a woman’s brain, on
average. Some of the most noticeable differences were in areas of the
brain that control language, memory, emotion and behavior, according to a 2014 report in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.To
find out whether these structural differences translated into cognitive
differences, scientists examined detailed brain scans of more than
1,400 men and women. No matter which group of people they looked at,
what type of scan was used or which part of the brain was examined, the
researchers consistently failed to find patterns that set men and women
apart.

“Although there are sex/gender differences in brain
structure, brains do not fall into two classes, one typical of males and
the other typical of females,” the team wrote in a study
published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. “Each brain is a unique mosaic of features, some of which may
be more common in females compared with males, others may be more common
in males compared with females, and still others may be common in both
females and males.”

To figure this out, the team – led by psychobiologist Daphna Joel
of Tel Aviv University in Israel – went hunting for examples of brain
“elements” that were either clearly male or clearly female. In other
words, they looked for examples of measurements that appeared to cluster
one way for men and another way for women, without much overlap in the
middle. Then, after identifying these elements, the researchers looked
to see whether women tended to have the “female” versions and men tended
to have the “male” versions.

They started with a set of
MRIs that measured the volume of gray matter in the brains of 112 men
and 169 women ages 18 to 79. On these scans, they examined 116 separate
regions and zeroed in on the 10 that showed the greatest difference
between men and women. In each case, the 281 scans were divided into
three categories – one-third considered “most male,” one-third
considered “most female” and one-third in the middle.

Thursday, November 26, 2015

Some 20 years ago Todd Gitlin wrote The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars. He was roundly booed by everyone with an investment in identity politics.

I
remember that period as it was when I first got on-line. I wasn't much
vested in the politics of identity and was constantly catching a bunch
of crap for being politically incorrect.

Over the last 20 years I
have come to view identity politics as one of the most universally
oppressive piles of bullshit to ever come down the pike.

You see
once there was something called the common good, things most people
could agree were good for the majority of people in this country and for
the country in general. There were enough things we could agree on.

Not everything turned into a fight complete with name calling.

Maybe
we used to feel we actually had some control over our lives, some real
say in how things were run. Maybe living in the real world was less
overwhelming than being flooded 24/7 with pleadings for support
accompanied by an inability to do anything about much of anything.

The message coming out of recent student protests on college campuses, from Princeton and Yale to the University of Missouri,
couldn’t be clearer: Students are rightly pained by the racist and
sexual abuse still shockingly common into the 21st century, and for good
reason they are indignant that institutions they trust — or wish to
trust — fail to stop the culprits, or even to acknowledge publicly the
harm they do.

But
rumbling under the surface of some recent protests is something besides
indignation: an assumption of grave vulnerability. The victims too
often present themselves as weak, in need of protection. Administrators
are held, like helicopter parents, wholly responsible. To a veteran of
movements of the ’60s like myself, this is strikingly strange.

Surely there are reasons to feel vulnerable to abuses of power. There is a rape culture. Black people are killed by the police in grotesque proportions. Hatred of immigrants has reached a high pitch of hysteria and looms large in the thinking of one of our major political parties.

It
is also true that many administrators are caught flat-footed; just
consider how long it took the University of Missouri to acknowledge
longstanding concerns by minority students about campus racism.

And
yet, when that recognition came and the president and chancellor
resigned, instead of celebrating an extraordinary victory — with
football players as their crucial allies — demonstrators blocked
photographers from taking pictures of their assembly. They apparently
believed that public assemblies ought to be “safe spaces,” meaning, safe
from photography, which might have been thought to be useful for
bringing the news to a larger public. Their starting assumption was that
the press had it in for them.

At Yale, meanwhile, administrators cautioned students about how to dress properly for Halloween,
and when another administrator publicly questioned whether this was an
issue the administration needed to take a position on, protesters
demanded her resignation.

We
can have it all: that is the promise of our age. We can own every
gadget we are capable of imagining – and quite a few that we are not. We
can live like monarchs without compromising the Earth’s capacity to
sustain us. The promise that makes all this possible is that as
economies develop, they become more efficient in their use of resources.
In other words, they decouple.

There are two kinds of decoupling:
relative and absolute. Relative decoupling means using less stuff with
every unit of economic growth; absolute decoupling means a total
reduction in the use of resources, even though the economy continues to
grow. Almost all economists believe that decoupling – relative or
absolute – is an inexorable feature of economic growth.

On this notion rests the concept of sustainable development. It sits at the heart of the climate talks in Paris next month and of every other summit on environmental issues. But it appears to be unfounded.A paper published earlier this year
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposes that even
the relative decoupling we claim to have achieved is an artefact of
false accounting. It points out that governments and economists have
measured our impacts in a way that seems irrational.

Here’s how
the false accounting works. It takes the raw materials we extract in our
own countries, adds them to our imports of stuff from other countries,
then subtracts our exports, to end up with something called “domestic
material consumption”. But by measuring only the products shifted from
one nation to another, rather than the raw materials needed to create
those products, it greatly underestimates the total use of resources by
the rich nations.

For instance, if ores are mined and processed at
home, these raw materials, as well as the machinery and infrastructure
used to make finished metal, are included in the domestic material
consumption accounts. But if we buy a metal product from abroad, only
the weight of the metal is counted. So as mining and manufacturing shift
from countries such as the UK and the US to countries like China and
India, the rich nations appear to be using fewer resources. A more
rational measure, called the material footprint, includes all the raw
materials an economy uses, wherever they happen to be extracted. When
these are taken into account, the apparent improvements in efficiency
disappear.

Monday, November 23, 2015

I for one am fed up with this cultural appropriation bullshit. Call the stretching exercises something else. Like Stretching Exercises based on Yoga.

I guess all the TaeKwondo, Karate and Kung-fu schools are going to have to close too.No
more studying languages other than your own or reading books, watching
movies outside your own culture. Better yet outside your own particular
identity group classification.Absolute
conformity to your designated identity community is mandatory otherwise
you could be labeled as having a psychiatric disorder called ODD
(Opposition Defiant Disorder).Wait I saw
movies from this dystopian nightmare. The series is called Divergent
and is based on a young adult series by the same name.Fuck
me. Being anti-authority/questioning authority/not being a good
sheeple makes one mentally ill in the Brave New World Order. Resisting
the 24/7 programming is being ... Well for want of a better term
Divergent.I should have known I was in
deep shit some 20 years ago when I faced ostracism for resisting the
ideology of the Transgender Borg CollectiveGrowing
up in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in a place where I was immersed
in the history of the American Revolution I considered my rights and
freedom to decide things for myself to be innate, as natural as a breath
of mountain air. I saw myself as an individual endowed with with basic
rights including the ability think for myself.

Telling people
they can't study things and learn for themselves about the world around
them is the worst sort of totalitarianism. It imposes ignorance and
places that ignorance on a pedestal of correct thinking.

I don't
give a shit if it is the right wing denying the importance to others of
their particular holidays that come at the end of the year or denying
sex education or denying climate change. Fuck those who claim sacred
status for yoga and other exercise techniques. Fuck those who demand
the world conform to their particular ideology. Fuck those who demand the world conform to their particular ideology. I
don't give a shit if it is so called progressives demanding I believe
their bullshit and accommodate their ultra sensitivities.You
can believe what ever the fuck you want. But I will go to war to
defend my right to believe something different if my learning and life
experiences have taught me something different.From The Washington Post:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/23/university-yoga-class-canceled-because-of-oppression-cultural-genocide/By Justin Wm. MoyerNovember 23, 2015In studios across the nation, as many as 20 million Americans practice yoga every day. Few worry that their downward dogs or warrior poses disrespect other cultures.

But
yoga comes from India, once a British colony. And now, at one Canadian
university, a yoga class designed to include disabled students has been
canceled after concerns the practice was taken from a culture
that “experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to
colonialism and western supremacy,” according to the group that once
sponsored it.

In a telephone interview with The Washington Post,
Jennifer Scharf, who taught the class for up to 60 people at the
University of Ottawa, said she was unhappy about the decision, but
accepted it.

“This particular class was intro to beginners’ yoga
because I’m very sensitive to this issue,” she said. “I would never want
anyone to think I was making some sort of spiritual claim other than
the pure joy of being human that belongs to everyone free of religion.”

“I
have unfortunate news,” the e-mail from a student representative of the
center read. “Apparently our centre has chosen not to do yoga for
programming this year. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns
in regards to this and I am welcome to explain. Thank you so much for
volunteering to do yoga over the past couple years. It has truly been
wonderful and I hope to stay in touch in the future.” (Scharf provided
the e-mail exchange to The Post, but removed the name of the
representative so the person could not be identified, saying: “I don’t
want to get anyone in trouble.” A message sent to the representative’s
e-mail address was not immediately returned.)

“That’s
disappointing news for sure, is there someone I can speak to about
this?” she wrote. “Do you know why the decision was made? I don’t mind
doing it for free so if money is a concern, that’s no problem.”

Money was not a concern, however. Culture was.

“I
think that our centre agreed … that while yoga is a really great idea,
accessible and great for students, that there are cultural issues of
implication involved in the practice,” the response read. “I have heard
from a couple students and volunteers that feel uncomfortable with how
we are doing yoga while we claim to be inclusive at the same time.”

Explaining that yoga has a fraught history, the representative continued.

“Yoga
has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being
practiced and what practices from what cultures (which are often sacred
spiritual practices) they are being taken from,” the e-mail read. “Many
of these cultures are cultures that have experienced oppression,
cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western
supremacy, and we need to be mindful of this and how we express
ourselves and while practicing yoga.”

At
an event earlier this year, I met two women who, as it turned out, were
not only business partners but also life partners. They left their
marriages and grown children in their 50s and have been together ever
since. My curiosity piqued, I'm afraid I monopolized their time with my
many questions. As someone who writes about midlife reinventions on my
site, Next Act for Women,
I am always on the lookout for women who have made major life changes,
whether personal or professional, later in life. This certainly
qualified.

As luck would have it, soon after, I received an unsolicited request from Lisa Ekus, who fell in love with another woman at 51 and wanted to share her story.
It was kismet. After hearing more about Lisa's background, and talking
to my sister, Kat, who also came out late, I felt there was a lot we
"straight" people needed to learn. Starting with my most glaring
misconception... 1. I DIDN'T "BECOME" GAY
Most of the women I interviewed were adamant that they did not suddenly
turn from straight to gay, but rather only awakened later in life to
their attraction to women. They feel this attraction has always been
there but had been previously inaccessible, for reasons individual to
each situation.

Lisa Dordal,
who came out after being married to a man for five years, explains, "I
finally embraced the fact that I was a lesbian when I came out of the
closet at age 30. I believe strongly that I was knit in the womb as a
lesbian. In retrospect, the clues had been there all along. In high
school and college, I wrote poems about girls and women I had crushes on
and can also remember falling in love with my best friend at 14--as
much as one can 'fall in love' at that age."

Candace Talmadge
agrees: "It's a question of acknowledging that which is already within
you and deciding to act on it instead of ignoring or burying it in the
closet. I tried to act straight and dated men without any success. I
could have continued on that unhappy road but I found a person who loves
and respects me and has been my best friend since 1986, and my spouse
since last year. She just happens to be female instead of male."

Dr. Lauren Costine, Psychologist, LGBTQ Activist, and author of Lesbian Love Addiction: Understanding the Urge to Merge and How to Heal When Things Go Wrong,
shares her journey: "Once I had worked on my internalized LGBTQ
phobias, I finally felt good enough about myself to be my authentic
self. I stopped worrying about what anyone thought about my identity and
who I loved and had sex with--especially my mother, who made it very
clear she did not want me to be a lesbian. It was very hard on me for a
long time because I did not want to disappoint her and I know her
inability to love this part of me affected my ability to come out
earlier in life. Unfortunately, she never accepted my lesbian identity
but I finally moved past needing her approval and started living my
life. And it's amazing! I love my life. I love being different and don't
want to be like everyone else. Life was way harder when I was trying to
be straight. Being an LGBTQ activist--trying to make the world a better
place for LGBTQ folks--takes away any discomfort I may have being a
sexual minority."

The alarming trend, overlooked until
now, has hit less-educated 45- to 54-year-olds the hardest, with no
other groups in the US as affected and no similar declines seen in other
rich countries.Though not fully understood, the increased
deaths are largely thought to be a result of more suicides and the
misuse of drugs and alcohol, driven by easier access to powerful
prescription painkillers, cheaper high quality heroin and greater
financial stresses.The turnaround reverses decades of falling
mortality rates achieved through better medical care and lifestyle
choices that continue to improve public health in other groups in the US
and in other nations around the world.“This was absolutely a
surprise to us. It knocked us off our chairs,” said Anne Case, an
economics professor at Princeton University who worked on the study.
Since discovering the trend, Case and her colleague Angus Deaton, also
an economics professor at Princeton, have shared the findings with
healthcare professionals. “We wanted to make sure we weren’t missing
something,” Case said. “Everyone’s been stunned.”The findings
emerged from a review of national surveys in the US and six other rich
industrialised countries, namely the UK, Australia, France, Germany,
Sweden and Canada.They showed that from 1978 to 1998, the
mortality rate for US whites aged 45 to 54 fell by 2% a year, a figure
very much in line with the celebrated improvements in health seen in the
other countries.

But after 1998, the death rates of US whites
began to buck the trend. While other countries saw their mortality rates
continue to fall, they began to rise among middle-aged white
non-Hispanic Americans by 0.5% a year. The effect was not confined to
the 45- to 54-year-olds. In the 35- to 44-year-old bracket, the
mortality rate stopped falling in 2000. For 55- to 59-year-olds, the
fall slowed to 0.5% a year.

A
couple of weeks ago President Obama mocked Republicans who are “down on
America,” and reinforced his message by doing a pretty good Grumpy Cat
impression. He had a point: With job growth at rates not seen since the
1990s, with the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance
hitting record highs, the doom-and-gloom predictions of his political
enemies look ever more at odds with reality.

Even more striking
are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans
are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly.
Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the
chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can cause. We’ve seen this
kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging
life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But
it’s a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America.Yet
the Deaton-Case findings fit into a well-established pattern. There
have been a number of studies showing that life expectancy for
less-educated whites is falling across much of the nation. Rising
suicides and overuse of opioids are known problems. And while popular
culture may focus more on meth than on prescription painkillers or good
old alcohol, it’s not really news that there’s a drug problem in the
heartland.

But what’s causing this epidemic of self-destructive behavior?

If
you believe the usual suspects on the right, it’s all the fault of
liberals. Generous social programs, they insist, have created a culture
of dependency and despair, while secular humanists have undermined
traditional values. But (surprise!) this view is very much at odds with
the evidence.

For one thing, rising mortality is a uniquely
American phenomenon – yet America has both a much weaker welfare state
and a much stronger role for traditional religion and values than any
other advanced country. Sweden gives its poor far more aid than we do,
and a majority of Swedish children are now born out of wedlock, yet
Sweden’s middle-aged mortality rate is only half of white America’s.

You
see a somewhat similar pattern across regions within the United States.
Life expectancy is high and rising in the Northeast and California,
where social benefits are highest and traditional values weakest.
Meanwhile, low and stagnant or declining life expectancy is concentrated
in the Bible Belt.What about a materialist explanation? Is
rising mortality a consequence of rising inequality and the hollowing
out of the middle class?

Climate scientists overwhelmingly say that we will face unprecedented warming in the coming decades. Those same scientists, just like you or I, struggle with the emotions
that are evoked by these facts and dire projections. My children—who
are now 12 and 16—may live in a world warmer than at any time in the
previous 3 million years,
and may face challenges that we are only just beginning to contemplate,
and in many ways may be deprived of the rich, diverse world we grew up
in. How do we relate to – and live – with this sad knowledge?

Across different populations, psychological researchers have documented a long list of mental health consequences
of climate change: trauma, shock, stress, anxiety, depression,
complicated grief, strains on social relationships, substance abuse,
sense of hopelessness, fatalism, resignation, loss of autonomy and sense
of control, as well as a loss of personal and occupational identity.

This
more-than-personal sadness is what I call the “Great Grief”—a feeling
that rises in us as if from the Earth itself. Perhaps bears and
dolphins, clear-cut forests, fouled rivers, and the acidifying,
plastic-laden oceans bear grief inside them, too, just as we do. Every
piece of climate news increasingly comes with a sense of dread: is it
too late to turn around? The notion that our individual grief and
emotional loss can actually be a reaction to the decline of our air,
water, and ecology rarely appears in conversation or the media. It may
crop up as fears about what kind of world our sons or daughters will
face. But where do we bring it? Some bring it privately to a therapist.
It is as if this topic is not supposed to be publicly discussed.

This
Great Grief recently re-surfaced for me upon reading news about the
corals on the brink of death due to warming oceans as well as
overfishing of Patagonian toothfish in plastic laden oceans. Is this a
surging wave of grief arriving from the deep seas, from the ruthlessness
and sadness of the ongoing destruction? Or is it just a personal whim?
As a psychologist I’ve learned not to scoff at such reactions, or
movements in the soul, but to honor them.

A growing body of
research has brought evidence from focus groups and interviews with
people affected by droughts, floods, and coastal erosion. When elicited,
participants express deep distress over losses that climate disruptions
are bringing. It is also aggravated by what they perceive as inadequate
and fragmented local, national and global responses. In a study by
researcher Susanne Moser on coastal communities, one typical
participant reports: “And it really sets in, the reality of what we're
trying to hold back here. And it does seem almost futile, with all the
government agencies that get in the way, the sheer cost of doing
something like that – it seems hopeless. And that's kind of depressing,
because I love this area.” In another study by sociologist Kari
Norgaard, one participant living by a river exclaims: “It’s like, you
want to be a proud person and if you draw your identity from the river
and when the river is degraded, that reflects on you.” Another informant
experiencing extended drought explained to professor Glenn Albrecht’s
team that even if “you’ve got a pool there – but you don’t really want
to go outside, it’s really yucky outside, you don’t want to go out.”

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson